School District Pays $610,000 to Settle Webcam Spying Lawsuits

A suburban Philadelphia school district is agreeing to pay $610,000 to settle two lawsuits brought by students who were victims of a webcam spying scandal in which high school-issued laptops secretly snapped thousands of pictures of pupils.

The agreed payout by the Lower Merion School District comes two months after federal authorities announced they would not prosecute administrators.

Prosecutors and the FBI opened an inquiry following a February privacy lawsuit accusing administrators of spying on students with webcams on the 2,300 district-issued MacBooks. The lawyers who filed lawsuits on behalf of two students acquired evidence in pretrial proceedings showing that the district secretly snapped thousands of webcam images of students, including pictures of youths at home, in bed or even “partially dressed.”

In an announcement Tuesday, the Board of School Directors agreed to pay $175,0000 to student Blake Robbins, and $10,000 for former pupil Jalil Hasan. As much as $425,000 in legal fees will be paid to their legal team, led by Mark Haltzman.

“Bottom line, it is time to resolve this matter and ensure that the District’s resources are focused squarely on educating our children,” the district said in a statement. The district has maintained that it only activated the LANrev Theft Track program when a computer was reported lost or stolen.

It said that its insurer, Graphic Arts, had agreed to pay $1.2 million in costs associated with the district’s defense.

The 6,900-pupil district, which provides students from its two high schools free MacBooks, was sued in federal court on allegations it was undertaking a dragnet surveillance program targeting its students — an allegation the district has repeatedly denied.

The original suit was based on a claim by Robbins, a sophomore at the time, that school officials reprimanded him for “improper behavior” based on photos the computer secretly took of the boy at home last fall. One picture shows him asleep at home last October.

That “behavior” turned out to be pill popping. The family said their son was eating Mike and Ike candy, his lawyer claimed.

In all, about 400 photos were taken of Robbins. The tracking software on Hasan’s computer snapped as many as 469 photographs and 543 screenshots of the former senior.